The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, the approaches described in this section may not be prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Current approaches for collecting electronic data from target systems have many limitations. One problem is that some conventional eDiscovery systems collect all data residing on computer resources even if some of the data is neither used nor requested. Relying on such systems may impede achieving proportionality between the cost of the eDiscovery and the amount of damages sought by claimants. For example, regardless of whether the amount of damages is in the range of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars, the cost of legal discovery performed using the conventional systems may be the same.
Another problem is that some conventional eDiscovery systems are configured to generate only encrypted hard drive maps that are difficult to browse and review. Other systems may store the collected data only in non-cloud-based storage systems, which have limited accessibility and capacity. In addition, many eDiscovery systems offer limited reporting functionality.
Moreover, since some systems may be configured to select electronic data files based only on extensions of the files, such selections may be inaccurate as users can easily modify the extensions. For example, if a request is to select those image JPEG files that have the *.jpg extension, then the image files that are in the JPEG format, but have their extensions modified to extensions other than *.jpg, may be excluded from the discovery.
Furthermore, some systems need to be implemented or installed onsite of the target system, and this may raise concerns about the integrity and security of the collected data. Also, accessing and using some of the systems may require specialized knowledge and experience, which may be unavailable in some situations. All the above may lead to an unsatisfactory user experience and concerns about security and efficiency of the data discovery process.